This is not a blog about complaints from people who can't find jobs right now. Other people have jobs, we will get jobs. Some of those posting here have jobs. The point is that these jobs will not be in the field that we got our degrees in. We have been trained in a skill which there are no jobs for - why were we told otherwise and why does the establishment continue this practice?

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

More evidence and an update on my situation

Here is an article from the middle of last year in the washington post about the lack of jobs for scientists

An excerpt:
"Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs."

When I was looking at this post google has chosen "Auto Tech Training School" as an ad to show me. Perhaps I could have gotten a position with that easier.

This isn't a recent problem, in 1995 Stanford has a report that there are too many PhDs, and instead of doing something the US education system continued to push up the enrollment in PhD programs for the last 20 years. http://news.stanford.edu/pr/95/950605Arc5192.html

As for my search I have had two interviews so far, one with a software company to do coding and one for a finance firm to parse data from various sources. The interview questions have thus far been very basic programming knowledge (in the case of the finance firm just a catagorical knowledge of linux and SQL commands would probably be enough). In all 116+ jobs I have found and applied for not one of them even wants me to solve difficult equations using numerics, I am to help businesss update their menus across the web (if I can even get that). The job I am currently qualified for is a tutor - but that is the ultimate in dead-end jobs for me as it has no chance for advancement and it does not count as experience to any future place I apply to. Again I want to really focus on the fact is not that I do not have a job right now - I'll get a job. It is just that it will be a job that my 10 years of physics training will have nothing to do with.